by Tiya Miles
SCARLET LETTERS
It is difficult to tell, by peering at the thread on the sack, exactly what Ruth’s capacities were in the art of sewing. She confines her use of embroidery to letters only, electing to omit pictorial imagery. She worked with “three strand-cotton embroidery floss,” and employed a basic “back-stitch.”76 The anthropologist Mark Auslander has observed that the “final three lines of the embroidery (in blue or green thread) are in a somewhat more mature or skilled hand,” leading him to wonder if Ruth began the work at one period in time and finished it in another.77 Perhaps Ruth did not yet possess the skill required to fashion the “hair-fine embroidery” akin to realistic painting described by E. Tammy Kim in homage to her grandmother’s handiwork. Or perhaps Ruth opted to omit pictures in favor of the specificity of language and purposefully retained only the vague impression of a heart shape in the spatial arrangement of her indented lines. Whatever her level of skill, Ruth seems to have been interested in the kind of telling in which words were worth more than pictures.
Ruth’s needlework is in many ways a singular creation. It does carry hints and imprints of other forms, such as the controlled, regulated, verselike lines of the middle-class schoolgirl sampler. At the same time, Ruth’s sewing veers off into distinctive terrain that suggests a personal purpose. In contrast to the nineteenth-century sampler, which typically contains alphabetic lines; biblical, moral, or poetic verse; local scenes, houses, or landmarks; autobiographical sketches; or genealogical information such as birth and death dates, Ruth’s embroidery chronicles an intergenerational family history in original language and with intense focus.78
By choosing to write through stitches, Ruth transformed her fabric canvas into a document, a written record of past events. This decision, similar to her election to work in a “feminine” form, elevated the cultural resonance of her creation. By scripting a family history onto the bag that was core to the story, Ruth accomplished two crucial feats: she succeeded in attaching a special story to a precious object, permanently joining them together so that neither would be forgotten, and she entered her family’s humble sack into the written record from which histories of the nation are made. Ruth turned the story she had heard through the years into a remarkable document, a written record with the cultural power to augment history. She created a form of what the grandmother character in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora insists upon when she passes down the family story of surviving slavery to her granddaughter: evidence. “They didn’t want to leave no evidence of what they done—so it couldn’t be held against them,” the grandmother insists. “And I’m leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too.”79 In her act of retelling a story she had been told in order to fix it in permanent form, Ruth Middleton, a domestic laborer, became an oral historian—a collector and interpreter of evidence, a preserver of knowledge about the past.
Ruth’s investment in history-making through written documentation and the preservation of a fragile artifact is apparent in her care for the sack (patched, folded, and stored over time) and the details she chose to inscribe. She offers, first, an orientation for the reader that includes historical context and key facts: her relationship to her subject matter, the names of the main actors in the narrative, the location of the action, the context of slavery. She shifts into narrative when recounting events unfolding in time: Rose giving Ashley a sack when a dramatic change befell them. She lists what the sack held with purposeful precision. She quotes the mother’s parting words (“Told her”), employing a space break rather than quotation marks to differentiate this direct speech, and using the color red, perhaps in keeping with the rendering of Jesus’s words in Bible translations.80 She moves to close the text by underscoring her relational tie to Ashley. Finally, Ruth documents her name and the date, lending this textile the feel of an official report equal to any document and standing as a poetic rebuttal to the anonymizing archives of slavery.
More than a recorder of events, Ruth offers an artistic interpretation of these historical happenings, too. Her moral indictment of slavery is clear in the final line of her narrative: “She never saw her again.” And alongside this charge, she concludes that love and family triumphed over immorality, suffusing the text with an enduring emotive tone through the stress she places on particular words. Ruth conveys this emotional emphasis directly. The word “Love” dominates her fabric page, declaring itself her major theme in the enlarged line: “It be filled with my Love always.” This choice to visually highlight feeling suggests what the poet Elizabeth Alexander has called the artist’s capacity to “envision what we are not meant to envision: complex black selves, real and enactable black power, rampant and unfetishized black beauty.”81
Ruth’s use of the color red combined with an emphasis on emotion taps into shared human associations with archetypal tropes. Cloth work, Ruth’s medium, gathers its communicative power through broad symbolic imitation and association on a relatively permanent material. Although cultural differences certainly exist in the use of fabrics, people associate pattern and color with aspects of shared human experience in order to make meaning. Think especially of culturally significant textiles such as the robe of a queen, the vestments of a priest, the flag of a nation, the dress of a bride, or the shroud of the dead, which all communicate meaning beyond their home cultures. Colored thread, invented between 3000 and 4000 b.c., was an important innovation in conveying such meaning. Red, one of the first dyes developed from plants, is among the most primal of textile color communicators, long representing vitality “in the imitation of blood.”82 In eliciting associations with blood, Ruth’s stitchery signifies at once the pain of slavery and the vibrancy of the beating heart.
She may also have been aware of old meanings the color red carried from slavery days in the coastal South. In the practice of magical folk religion by enslaved people, red flannel was preferred for the bundling of sacred objects, such as roots, graveyard dust, or animal bones, invested with supernatural power. These conjure bags or gris-gris bags held either protective or destructive properties, depending on the kind of magic the conjurer had locked into it through ritual.83 Ruth uses this red line in her record—the brightest and biggest of them all—to emphasize the culturally layered meanings in her narrative palimpsest. We can imagine her hope that her reader (herself at a later point in life, or her daughter, or a descendant she could not yet imagine) would sense these rich reverberations when they encountered the object.
Like miners with our headlamps on, we could continue to dig for Ruth’s interpretations as conveyed by the lines of the sack. We might or might not be in keeping with Ruth’s intentions in our haul of subterranean meanings. Ruth chooses to name her foremothers but not her forefathers, suggesting a particular investment in women’s history and a rejection of a paternal line that might include enslavers. While she names unfree forebears, she refuses to name the people who owned them, limiting their centrality in her record. In offering an inventory of all that Rose packed, including love, Ruth produces a ledger of what enslaved people, counted as possessions, themselves possessed: the hard-won material things that could cushion bruised spirits and the strength of character as well as feeling that could carry generations through adversity.84
Did Ruth take a writer’s license in the order of the items she named on the sack: a dress, pecans, a braid, love? Did she intend to shape a narrative that moves incrementally into an interior space of Black experience, beginning with the external covering of clothing, shifting to the ingested matter of food, noting an outgrowth of the body itself, and ending at a center of feeling? Is this how she understood the story of her ancestors’ sack, as a journey inward to the self that is at heart relational? And did she seek to preserve that experience in her craft, steadily leading the reader from an outer material state to an inner emotional sphere, perhaps maintaining a trace of how her grandmother had told it? In place of the cold slave list, Ruth gives us a family recipe
, the life-sustaining ingredients a mother passes on to a daughter. And chief among these ingredients of clothing, food, and lineage is the emotional driver of love. Told her—Rose said, Ashley recalled, and Ruth stitched—It be filled with my Love always.
The many ways we can interpret these sparse yet pregnant lines reveal Ruth’s inscription as more than evidence, more than an inventory, more than a record, more than a history. The sewing on Ashley’s sack relies on an immediacy of form, a crispness of diction, and an emotional shimmer reminiscent of literary poetry. Some might even feel that this inscription reads like haiku, a form of poetry characterized by its brief numbers of lines, a seasonal tag, implicit references to a preexisting body of like poems, the recounting of an event, and a tone of openness or “welcome.”85 In this swatch of sentences read as poetry, Ruth is greeting her ancestors, welcoming them into her memory and into reunion with one another.86 Similarly to haiku, this sack embroidered by busy hands has zero extra words to spare. It reduces down to steam in the pot, a ghost in our peripheral vision, the essential yet ephemeral thing all human beings need. Here, at the bottom of the sack, we find unburied the gift of love, which, as the poet Nicole Sealey has said, is the satisfying sound of a poem “click[ing] shut.”87
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Ruth Middleton stood toward the end of a long line of women survivors. She was clearly conscious, even reverent, of this lineage and her special place in it, and she used fabric, as women had for centuries, in a process not only of “memorializing their families,” but also of “creating” those families.88 Perhaps this sensibility of family-making by passing down objects inspired Ruth’s use of varied earth tones in her embroidery. The brown thread of the opening lines gives way to green thread by the close, mimicking the loose form of an inverted family tree, with roots reaching back into the past and shoots fanning out into the future, where the written record of known time ends.89 A daughter, mother, embroiderer, storyteller, and historian of her family’s past, Ruth died of tuberculosis while in her mature youth, not yet forty. She had been ill for months and under the care of her friend Martha Horsey, who also provided data for the death certificate. Ruth succumbed to the disease at Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital in the winter of 1942, just under a century since her grandmother Ashley had been taken from her great-grandmother Rose in an undocumented slave sale. Ruth’s own daughter, Dorothy, who would have inherited the sack, passed on in 1988 with no known lineal descendants.90 Afterward, the textile was lost, perhaps boxed, donated, or sold with other items once attached to these lives as ephemeral as our own.91 But the bag Rose packed, the cloth Ashley kept, and the tale Ruth told live on to declare the staying power of love’s ties and women’s stories.
CONCLUSION
IT BE FILLED
Well now, what about us, the women who were sitting here in Mt. Zion Church, the women coming after our great ancestresses? WHO OF YOU KNOW HOW TO CARRY YOUR BURDEN IN THE HEAT OF THE DAY?
— Mamie Garvin Fields recalling a speech by Mary Church Terrell, president, National Association of Colored Women, in Charleston, 1916
Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World, 1989
African American things had little chance to last. This is a painful lesson learned by family historians and museum curators. How could people who were property acquire and pass down property? How could families auctioned like cattle hold on to a Bible or a bead? An excess of trauma, a glut of disruption, and a surfeit of sudden migration severely limited the chances for enslaved people to maintain troves. Cast into a faulty freedom following the Civil War, without the benefit of savings or stockpiles, formerly enslaved parents and children often lived hand to mouth, desperate to fend off crushing debt peonage. They lacked land, animals to work it, and tools to aid in their labor. They could claim few personal items beyond “the clothes on their backs.”1 The modicum of things Black families did manage to acquire and hold on to were accorded little value by outsiders. Compared to other groups with a stability afforded by earnings, wealth, or racial privilege, Black people’s possessions were more likely to wind up in dump pits and rag bins as families lost elder members, moved on, or were pushed out during the height of Jim Crow segregation and racially motivated violence.2 “There are so many stories about the objects that were lost,” the family historian Kendra Field has noted, “lost letters, lost photographs, lost objects of meaning.”3 When African American things are lost, the stories once joined to them weaken, memories of the past fray, historical evidence shrinks, and intergenerational wisdom fades.
This loss of the material traces of history, which stands alongside a multitude of other losses in African American experience, has grave ramifications for well-being. Human values and human relations have been expressed and revealed through things for as long as we have been painting on cave walls and making tools. We come to know ourselves through things, cement community ties through things, think with things, and remember what is important to us with the aid of objects.4 Beyond the critical role of communicating information, things function as tokens and repositories, as staples in the fabric of time, as a means to effect psychological, emotional, and existential transport or to “convey viewers to another world or state of being.”5 This quality allows people to use things in the service of compassion and communal life. When we see, touch, and consider another person’s cherished object, we come to appreciate their experience and their group’s experience that much more. In this way, the physical materials that we find, preserve, or make (from rocks and shells to books, blankets, and buildings) can function like social glue, adhering individuals to one another through felt relationship.
Interior page of the Morton family Bible. Aaron and Gardenia Morton used this family Bible as an archive, storing inside its pages hair clippings, lists of births and deaths, and funeral announcements. The parents of seven children (two boys and five girls), they passed the Bible down across generations. It remains a family keepsake today. Family story shared by Jessica D. Moorman. Photograph by Tiya Miles. Used by permission of Jessica D. Moorman.
Beyond connecting people, things contain their own vitality, profusion of spirit, or even, we could say, personality. We recognize how many things in our daily lives were once (and are still?) alive when we consider the way in which materials (building supplies, clothing, glass bottles, and so on) are harvested from the living earth. We sense this strange quality of seeming aliveness when certain things capture our notice (a pearlescent button winking in the sunlight, a porcelain doll with perceptive eyes, a sculptural acorn poised like a dancer, a four-leaf clover lying in wait). Particular things can affect our thoughts, moods, and movements, as if they are acting in the world.6 Enlivened things can call us into recognition of a material world that exists independently of the human sphere of action but also intersects with our lives. Cultivating a consciousness of this vibrant physical realm and a recognition of the ethical and primal implications of our interdependence with it may “chasten fantasies of human mastery” over nature and other people. It could help us find ways to live differently than we have since the industrial revolution, which has so badly damaged this physical planet.7
Having been treated as possessions and deprived of ownership of themselves, their families, crops they nurtured, and objects they made and maintained, African American survivors of slavery recognized the world of things. They lived each day in haunted awareness of the thin boundary line between human and non-human, a thinness daily exposed and abused by slave societies. Despite the prominence of a Cartesian duality in Western philosophy that proposed a clear split between spirit and matter, enslaved Blacks knew that people could be treated like things and things prized over people. Awash in this awful knowledge, African Americans may have been early theorists of the mercurial nature of things. In this understanding, they would have joined Nativ
e Americans, the first thing-thinkers on this continent who affirmed in their stories and lived through their actions a belief that many things have a kind of spirit and are capable of relationship. In their everyday lives, Indigenous North Americans recognized the animated nature of things as well as the innate relationality of people, non-human animals, and plants, all of which, scientists now confirm, share common fundamental elements (such as cell structure, chemical makeup, and DNA).8
In addition to enslaved people’s knowing all too well the metaphysical quality of things that went deeper than the bare necessity of what was needed for survival, comfort, honor, and social connection, their understanding of the role of possession and possessions in their own subjugation motivated their desperate attempts to acquire and retain things of value. Objects became “weapons” in the ongoing struggle for dignity and liberty. Enslaved people used “coins, cloth, drams of liquor, [and] battered top hats” in pursuit of freedom and purpose. For them, things amounted to a real world of provision and beyond that, to “ ‘dream worlds’ of material possibility.”9 Material objects performed many functions in the lives of Black people and, indeed, all people, from the practical and economic uses of items to the mental and emotional meanings of things.